Most companies have both customer support and product development departments. Generally, the customer support department operates entirely separate from product development. The customer support department focuses on responding to customers' questions and complaints about currently available products and services. The product development department focuses not on the problems or features of the current products and services, but instead on developing the next generation or version of such products and services. One traditional reason given for the separation of customer support and product development is that if the product development team were busy responding to customer issues, the product development cycle would come to a standstill, since more time would be spent responding to questions and comments than developing product. Another reason given for the separation is that it is better to have trained and polished customer support agents deal with all customer-facing situations in order to project an appropriate and consistent corporate image. Product development personnel are not typically trained to handle customer inquires.
As a result of this separation, the valuable customer information that flows into the customer support organization from the customers is either not harvested or, at best, is culled and summed into generalized graphs and statistics showing levels of customer satisfaction with the current products. The nuggets of customer-driven insight about improvements or requested features are lost in this data aggregation process.
Further, because the direct feedback from customers is not made available to the product developers, companies instead turn to customer focus groups, surveys and other information gathering tasks in order to understand customer needs and wants. However, these groups only occasionally connect the actual product development engineers with the customers. Instead, such groups are managed by marketing teams who then compile and report their finding to product managers.
One solution currently used to manage customer feedback is a dedicated customer support software application. The customer support software application is designed primarily for tracking customer issues, logging complaints, accessing technical support documentation, and creating service metrics describing customer support performance. One problem with dedicated support applications is that they are by definition a separate application from other tools and software used by the enterprise's employees. There are several problems with this approach. First, a license must be purchased for the application (either per user, site, or other usage model), and continued investment must be made to maintain the dedicated application through upgrades, maintenance, additional hardware and so forth. Thus a dedicated customer support application can pose a significant additional investment for most companies. Second, employees must be separately trained on the application, thereby resulting in further costs and drain on resources.
Third, and perhaps most importantly, the inclusion of yet another application in the set of applications used by employees makes it that much more unlikely to be used frequently and properly. This is particularly true where the additional application is considered by employees as not part of the “core” applications they use in their primary job function, such as word processors, spreadsheets, programming environments, and so forth. Thus, adding a further specialized application to the employees' application suite will typically result in employees being less responsive.